The subject matter discussed in the background section should not be assumed to be prior art merely as a result of its mention in the background section. Similarly, a problem mentioned in the background section or associated with the subject matter of the background section should not be assumed to have been previously recognized in the prior art. The subject matter in the background section merely represents different approaches, which in and of themselves may also correspond to the claimed embodiments.
Within an on-demand service environment it is necessary to authenticate users before allowing them to access any particular data repository so as to ensure the user possesses the appropriate credentials. This is generally referred to as the user log in process.
From an infrastructure point of view the user log in process may be handled via centralized log in servers which are dedicated to handling the authentication process. Such a model is less complex but also provides for a single point of failure which may be catastrophic to a services provider.
Alternatively, a distributed model may be utilized such that computing resources throughout the service provider's infrastructure perform user authentication for the user log in process, but the distributed approach has conventionally required replication of users so as to enable the disparate non-centralized servers to handle such requests without having to reference or communicate with a single centralized repository as part of the user log in process.
Unfortunately, replicating users is problematic because users are globally unique, and thus, replication of users for the sake of a distributed authentication model violates the requirement that any given user be globally unique within such a system.
The present state of the art may therefore benefit from methods, systems, and apparatuses for implementing a cross instance user authentication architecture as described herein.